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9/11: in search of context and meaning
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| 11 September 2002 |
By Alfred Rolington, Managing Director, Jane’s Information Group
The shock of September 11 2001 still reverberates around the world. It has become a global event. At the time it was a very American event broadcast on all media – live. It reached into the American psyche. It broke the concept of US isolationism. It brought home medieval European struggles. It changed America and made it paranoid, deeply frustrated, angry and sorrowful.
The questions and anger remains. But two questions still need some answers. What was the motivation of the bombers and their backers? And was it possible to have prevented the attacks?
The most obvious point is that Al-Qaeda is at the extreme end of a broader base of criticism (which is basically non-violent) that sees in America the new Globalisation, the new Roman Empire, the apparent arrogance and pride which it is said Americans display in their economics, their politics and their pervasive culture from film to retail.
The extremists have chosen in this case to focus their ire on two ‘localised’ examples of what they perceive as American arrogance and excessive pride: US military bases and support for the non-elected ruling clan of Saudi Arabia; and US support for Israel against the Palestinian requirement for a homeland.
Would it have mattered to these bombers whether the enemy was American in particular? Only, it seems, at this point in history. Previously it could easily have been and still is the French, the British and the Russians among others. Whoever are considered the supporters of Royal Gulf Power and in particular the Israeli Jewish ‘lobby’ are the enemy.
What is their underlying purpose? Can we say – as some Americans, more Europeans and many from other parts of the world have said – that, although we abhor their methods, nonetheless the terrorists “have a point”?
Al-Qaeda’s historical perspective
They have a point of view certainly, but it is interesting to analyse the moral/philosophic focus and perspective that Al-Qaeda’s ‘spiritual’ leaders discuss.
The philosophy takes its roots from different – but they claim connected – historical viewpoints.
One comes from an extreme Muslim factional view, which is fundamental or prescriptive in its interpretation of the Koran. Part of this is that women are carriers of male temptation. Al-Qaeda’s followers are tribal and hierarchical in their power structure with a religious belief in retribution, male dominance and patronage. This is a ‘reading’ of the Koran which says that Western domination must be confronted and crushed by divine sanction. Martyrs to the cause will not die; many virgins, fresh waters and sustenance in heaven will be their inheritance.
This partial older reading of culture has been connected to ideas that were current in the fascistic regimes of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Hitler, Stalin, Franco and Mussolini are considered by Al-Qaeda’s leaders as interesting and potentially sensible purveyors of a philosophy that promotes the particular against the general, that fundamentally places women in a subservient role and that is at root anti-Semitic.
Those living within the liberal free markets of Europe and particularly America, with its freedoms of speech, press and capitalist expansion, are uncontrollable heathens who need to be brought down, punished and made subservient by this narrow brand of so-called Islam – similar in fact and interpretation to the narrow base that fascism and the extreme patriot movements rest upon in the West. The Oklahoma City bombing, for all its ideological and cultural differences, was still based on a perceived supremacy and temporal madness that is similar to this Middle-Eastern form of organised myopia.
Terrorism’s purpose
Terrorism of any type suggests and presupposes a political incumbent legitimacy. As the cliché states, one government’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. To those maimed on the streets of Belfast, Gaza, London, Algiers, Oklahoma City or New York, this is a moot point.
Insurgency of any sort usually has three principal objectives. The first is to take on a large, powerful government and its culture, usually using explosive force. This is directed purposely not against the military, but against unarmed and unprepared civilians. The second aim is to make terror into a newsworthy headline and set of images that brings that culture to a paranoid state of inaction and disbelief for as long as possible.
Usually, the third objective is to bring about a complete change of the incumbent government or at least government policy on a narrow focus of issues. Al-Qaeda has certainly followed the first two objectives, but has been surprisingly reticent about the third.
One way, it is suggested, to change the insurgents’ action is through negotiation, altering the underlying political or economic condition. This type of action can be seen as one aspect of a holistic approach to an insurgency problem. At the extreme, governments that employ this method are seen and criticised as appeasers. This is a difficult position to call, although some commentators have condemned all such action. Was the incumbent government and the West, including the USA, that negotiated with the ANC and Nelson Mandela wrong, and was the British Government in negotiating with the IRA in the guise of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness also wrong, or does a hard-boiled pragmatism eventually follow years of death and unrest?
However, negotiation from a point of strength is also, it is said, necessary, and so a ‘holistic approach’ is called for in which force or threats of force, economic ‘carrot and stick’, propaganda, intelligence, covert action and politics all play their part.
Al-Qaeda and 9/11 are now locked into the American psyche such that separation is now difficult. Fewer Muslims would now argue with the conviction that the link between Bin Laden and 9/11 has not been made.
Was prevention possible?
This at least in one way brings us to the question ‘Was it possible to have prevented these attacks?’ From the point of view of a commercial intelligence organisation like Jane’s, this is very important.
Regardless of whoever was behind the 9/11 attacks, there were certain aspects of that day and the preceding ones that were known. The hijackers were, in part, known to be on some wanted lists. It had been known for some time that Al-Qaeda was training pilots. George Tenet, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had made it abundantly clear that he believed a terrorist attack on the homeland of America was imminent and he had stated that Al-Qaeda was suspected. Why, therefore, was there nothing clearly done to disrupt this attack?
Politicians from Clinton to Bush must bear some of the blame. Clinton had reduced US human intelligence (HUMINT) assets and had made it much more difficult for the CIA to act covertly. Briefings to Bush also seem not to have had the required actionable effect. Former CIA director Jim Woolsey, certainly no Clinton supporter but a strong voice of CIA support, lays the blame in large measure at Clinton’s feet.
“There is also evidence that the friction between the CIA and FBI added in large measure to an intelligence failing”; statements like this have been used often in the last 12 months.
An open, partially public inquiry, biased though it probably would be, would still shed light on many of the problems that America is having extreme difficulty confronting. However, this is now less likely to occur – at least in the short term while the spotlight has moved to Iraq. From the incumbent politicians’ viewpoint, it is easy to see that they would prefer not to have an inquiry. There would be few winners in this process.
However, many information and intelligence organisations would do well to review their history, processes and methodologies and measure what could be improved.
The problem, if we are completely honest, is that there were a lot of ‘red flags’ concerning Al-Qaeda’s intentions which, when they are brought together, make difficult and telling reading.
Scenario planning and history
First, however, we must look back at why this kind of scenario information planning has not been widely used.
As tools, language and speech make it possible to accumulate experience and knowledge in forms that facilitate its storage, cross-referencing and dissemination. As Mirabeau expressed it: “The two greatest inventions of the human mind are writing and money – the common language of intelligence and the common language of self-interest.”
Language may well be a prominent human invention, but the out-flowing of this creation into usable intelligence has in the main been used in narrow personal ways. To put it in a more understated way, our understanding and action change only to suit new methods and technologies. As technologies move on, the incumbent structures, previous understandings and older processes become obsolete and needlessly bureaucratic. They can no longer enhance the new currents of understanding as efficiently as the new order wants to make use of them.
Closed societies and organisations that become redundant or bureaucratic take on a non-functional, repetitive language. Cultures which once might have been relevant to a previous reality often are now just going through the motions of action and mock efficiency, often with pomp and circumstance but lacking in any tangible result.
In oral cultures that pre-date writing, there is an emphasis on memory and training. Writing, when it arrives, extends and has the effect of replacing memory. It implies a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves of logic, which again begin to channel readers and later writers into a way of thinking.
The printing revolution of the 15th Century gave this way of thinking its method of social dissemination. Gutenberg’s press of 1455 was one of the first examples of this in its mass production and dissemination of the bible. Gradually it replaced the scribes and it signaled the end of the power of interpretation by the priesthood. But it did something perhaps even more profound by having to confront the problems of physical print and press technology: Gutenberg, and later Caxton, began to fix categories in the language.
Grammar, spelling, punctuation and the uniform way in which type fonts are used express regularity and control, adding their own form of power and bias to the written word. Gutenberg’s revolution was also an example of commoditisation, of reducing the power of the previous craft of scribing and giving power to the few who understood print technology and could make it work.
Printing removed the requirement for scribes and demystified the knowledge of the priesthood. It began the process of individual interpretation surpassing given wisdom. It also set the words in history. The word became fixed.
In the Renaissance, this gave energy to the shift away from firstly church power, then monarchical power towards parliament. It objectified the text away from the authorities that had once owned it.
This process of democratisation of knowledge also led to the commoditisation of expert experience and this process continues today.
As societies in the West have become more commercially based, one of the processes employed has been to increase the knowledge content of machines, thereby reducing the experience required to complete tasks or stepping up a task’s rapidity. This industrial and now electronic process has prompted, among many other things, an observation from McLuhan that “humans have for a long time been engaged in extending one or other of their sense organs. One way is with machines. Using first animals as machines and then technology, people have extended their skill, strength and capabilities at the expense of other faculties.”
Gutenberg and the Medievalists
Gradually, through the centuries since Gutenberg, we have begun to categorise knowledge in other ways that ostensibly make it more utilitarian, using the map, the dictionary, the thesaurus and the encyclopaedia, as well as codes, law books and searchable databases.
We have also defined information in other ways: facts, fiction, opinion and analysis. We now have an accepted semiotic design structure, which uses content pages, headlines, summaries and indexes to navigate through text.
The combinations of these categorisations have standardised the way we come at information, and the way it is written and printed has also altered the way we think, speak and teach. It imposes a structure which is not there in ‘reality’.
Gutenberg’s bible did have a table of contents, and later an index. Both of these navigation tools took up less than one per cent of the total content. Even today with most reference books, the index takes up less than five per cent of the total content.
We have traditionally relegated the categorisation and analysis of information into a far lesser role than the body of the text itself. We have not applied the same understanding and taxonomy of knowledge, as we did with the dictionary or encyclopaedia, to the vast amounts of information now available.
Moving to recent times, the new electronic revolution in information dissemination is again changing the quality and quantity of information now available to a significantly larger audience than was available by print. It is also altering and compressing the timing of dissemination. People watched in real time as a plane crashed into the towers in New York.
This process alters not only people’s perception of news, but also their perception and expectation of politics and the policymakers’ response to events. Control of the message has again shifted away from governments and into the commercial press agencies. Like all organisations, these bodies tend to map the oceans of potential information in ways that suit their economic criteria, as well as their collection, processing and dissemination methods.
In many organisations there is awareness of how imprecisely we categorise information. Certainly methods used in linguistics, some aspects of philosophy, all the way to such people as Sausser and Harold Innis have all pointed to failings, but because of the sheer volume of the problem the issue tends to get neglected.
The problem has, of course, become far more potent since September 11 2001.
Some commentators have written about asymmetric threats and have been discussing how we might formulate a range of information categories that could assist deeper, more focused analysis. At this point we know that these meta-categories should be capable of sifting and analysing all of our existing information and making our databases more useful, focused and efficient.
9/11 and scenario prediction
Again the events of September 11 have thrown these issues into sharp focus. The problem in one sense is simple. There was enough information prior to 11 September to ask some very pertinent questions that could have been used to develop a range of scenario planning options and deeper research.
In the August 2001 edition of one of our publications, Jane’s Intelligence Review, we published a series of articles on Al-Qaeda. These were written between May and June 2001. Some information went up on our website in June and July and a hardcopy version appeared in late July with an August cover date. Inside, it talked in detail about Bin Laden’s organisation and, buried in the flow, we reported that he was known to be training individuals as commercial pilots.
The relevance of this is, of course, easy to see with 20/20 hindsight, but like everyone we were swamped by massive information flows.
A few people, because of their knowledge of previous events, began to break the problem of information overload and scenario planning into two distinct parts: information technology and its current capabilities; and the process of deeper analysis and understanding of information and its component parts.
For intelligence to be actionable it must answer the real questions that the customer is asking, but it must also tell them something they did not even know they needed to know.
Intelligence must fulfil the role that policymakers have set for it, but it should also help to set that policy by clarifying the question. It should get to the root of who, and how the problem arose in the first place. Only by getting closer and deeper towards those assumptions built into the question can we, as information suppliers, really do the job required.
Customer expectations have dramatically moved on since that mythically comfortable world before the CNN News Factor. We now tend to respond to the news rather than attempting to get behind it and create policy.
The technology and immediacy of the news generated from a myriad of sources has changed customer expectations, but it has also made many of us believe in the technology itself. Technology is often placed before serious creative thinking.
It is often easier to get money for technology than it is to get more people. Accountants prefer the one-off and predictable write-off procedures of capital projects rather than ongoing – even if much cheaper – staff costs. Also, it is often more acceptable with politicians and boards of directors to buy high tech than go for the apparently ‘low-tech’ people option.
XML tags
Technology is important, and the technology innovation that will begin to make a significant difference to our analytical and predictive capabilities is gradually being introduced. The language tagging software and processes associated with XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) and all its progeny will, for the first time, allow us to quickly and effectively scan an entire database and identify everything to do with specified concepts, events or organisations. It can break the whole database into small, usable and searchable units and bundle them into rough but usable reports.
This is all fine as far as it goes. For instance, by searching on Saudi Arabia, Palestinian, Israel and Bin Laden we would receive a rough, usable report that would probably be hundreds of pages in length, but it would still be a very unstructured text. And here we come across a deeper problem that has been with publishing from its inception. It is now well over 500 years since the Gutenberg printing revolution began in the 1450s. This, for all its incredible impact, was primarily a production revolution. Its primary purpose was not to change the content of information. It may have had some unintended consequences in altering the grammar, punctuation and so on, but the information message was similar to what had been laboriously produced by the preceding scribes.
Since that time we have added chapters, contents tables and indexes, but even with all the added benefits of the Renaissance, scientific methods, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, electric power, radio, television and the Web we still categorise information in the same unstructured and imprecise groupings that Gutenberg would recognise.
Fiction, non-fiction, news, news analysis and opinion. These are some of the most ‘precise’ ways in which we have defined our products. And unfortunately we continually mix and merge these groupings, using them in similar ways and often believing them to contain similar weight and importance.
We perhaps still do not understand the underlying meaning of information. For many people this is not a problem – at least not a pressing one – because if you produce fiction or general consumer publications this is not particularly relevant to your text. However, for the intelligence community deeper analysis is now crucial.
Categorisation of text
One way forward, perhaps, would be to use XML technology to sweep our database for particular subjects or events and then employ a new and separate set of researchers and analysts to do the detailed research and categorisation. For instance, just as a small example we have broken down the events related to the Arab/Israel conflict and the links it has with Bin Laden’s organisation.
Factual – “This is an F-16 sold to Israel by the US”.
Contextual – “used by the Israelis over Palestinian terrority in 2000 and condemned by Bin Laden’s organisation”.
Analytical – “These aircraft were used to create a political image of heavy response and retaliation. This apparently gave more financial strength to Al-Qaeda because there was a backlash that increased the amount of donations to the organisation”.
Opinion – “From any critical perspective, with any understanding of the geography and potential for Palestinian response, this was an over-reaction by the Israelis who used F-16s purposely as this signaled America’s support for the operation”.
Commentary – “During the first 17 months of the first intifada almost 15 years ago one Israeli died for every 25 Palestinians killed. During the last 17 months the overall ratio has narrowed to 1 to 3. Dr Rayan of Hamas has said: ‘It’s much better than the past. We are putting pressure on Sharon. These are quality attacks.’”
“‘We don’t have F-16s, Apache helicopters or missiles,’ said Abdelaziz Rantisi of Hamas. ‘They are attacking us with weapons against which we can’t defend ourselves. And now we have a weapon [the suicide bomber] they cannot defend themselves against.’”
“An Israeli military spokesperson said: ‘Bombs with a human mind are smart weapons with a new technology.’”
Covert – “We know who the real target of the attack was and what the mission’s political purpose was”.
Operational – “Two of the weapons failed to operate and one missed its target, causing collateral damage. The result was five deaths and the destruction of a mosque.”
Publicity – “Ninety-six per cent of the press only reported what the governments on each side had briefed”.
Historical/predictive – “This operation in June 2000 was one of 15 similar operations over the Gaza Strip going back 10 years. However, this one represented the beginning of a new aerial factor in the tension and eventually it is believed that this will develop into all-out war in the Spring of 2002. Bin Laden said Al-Qaeda’s operations were a response to the US actions in Saudi Arabia and the US-backed Israeli government’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza.”
Propaganda/spin/bias – “any information generated for a purpose other than accuracy. For instance, Hamas’s English website was used to undermine Israeli families whose young adults are taking part in the conflict, while on the other side the government planted stories in the Jerusalem Post which in legalistic terms discuss the killing of Palestinian officials as a morally justifiable response to suicide bombers, especially after the Allied bombing of Kabul.”
When analysing the operations of certain other suicide attacks and overlaying information concerning Bin Laden’s operation, the new team would analyse the elements that do not easily fit into these models. One such element was that some of Bin Laden’s people were being trained to fly commercial jets.
This information came from the trial of the US Embassy bombers in Africa. The word ‘training’, with its suggestion of present work for a future outcome, should have been the signal triggering deeper research. This is because a similar commercial aircraft attack had been aimed at Paris some years ago.
Weighting the scenario
The next issue is how you give these categories a ranking of importance so they do not get lost in the information ‘noise’.
In conversation people often jump from the news/gossip event, to history, to opinion and out to myth. They make little distinction between them. This is fine for social life, but for the information and intelligence process it is problematic and confusing.
To make this categorisation more useful we would give this information weighting. One way of doing this is to try and make more sense of the meaning and context of information.
By constructing concentric information cells, moving out from a potential or reported event, you can ‘visualise’ the data more effectively. The event is at the centre and news about it is in the first circle; the second circle is analysis; the third informed opinion. History is in the next circle, moving out to myth at the outer edges along with spin, nonsense and propaganda. All aspects of the circles are given different weights. From that first circle we can begin to add a second for scenario planning. This would be where the word ‘training’ in the previous Al-Qaeda example would set off the analysis.
All of this seems a long way from the small craft printers working in Europe in the 15th Century, but the changes in dissemination of information have altered the content and the possibilities of interpretation and use just as happened with Gutenberg and those early publishers.
New research teams with less bias of collection should be used to research the consequences of these methods. Finally, we should begin to posit a Post-Modernist perspective on information with an aim to clarify bias and definitions, with parts of the process directed at a more predictive scenario approach.
Intelligence providers and publishers should move from being liberators of thought and standardisers of language to providing context. We now need to judiciously use technology to further digitise and deeply tag content. We should understand and assist customers with informed decisions that get to and enhance the question being asked, moving them faster to the content being sought and giving it deeper context.
This article began with 9/11 and its effects on America’s confidence and psyche, and this still needs attention, but if we are to apply part of our energy to analysing the information issues, the debate has a long way to travel.
In an era of CNN-covered warfare and new and emerging asymmetric threats, it is time that organisational and information changes are discussed before the next shocking event and its inevitable backlash.
Alfred Rolington
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